What Is The Purpose of Advertising?
Why Do Customers Forget?
Customers forget because of the way human memory is wired. The human memory is an interactive system comprising of three branches – the sensory register, the short and the long-term store. The first branch- the sensory register – has a lifespan less than half a second. The sensory register explains how people forget an advert immediately after they have seen it.
The second branch is the short-term store. The short-term store is the working memory or attention span. Neuroscientists put its lifespan at between 15 and 30 seconds. Based on studies conducted by Microsoft, the attention span of the average person is 8 seconds or less than that of a gold fish! The limitations of the attention span explains why people often forget an advert in a few seconds after they see it.
The third branch of memory – the long-term store – is memory that lasts forever. It is permanent memory. It relies on connected sensual interactions to store things in memory. For example, the words you see on this page have an intrinsic auditory sound even if you do not read them aloud. You have a unique emotion or perception about this blog, even if you do not stop to think about it. The link between the audio-visual perception and the emotional connection reinforces a permanent record of the blog in memory. In other words, customers remember if you can establish a unique audio-visual and emotional link in their long-term memory!